Tourists

I felt like quite the American tourist today! We were supposed to go to Piha Beach and Honeymoon Cove today, but it rained all Friday night, and was still tsunami-y this morning. So JJ changed some plans around, and we ended up going to the Auckland Museum and War Memorial and then to Kelly Tarlton’s Underwater Adventure. We weren’t wearing fanny packs or big hats, but we did take as many pictures as we could :)

Here is the museum...it was HUGE. Three stories: Ground Level-Maori Culture, People, History; Level One-Land, Ocean, Volcanoes; Level Two-Scars on our Hearts War Memorial.

We started on the Maori level. This was inside a huge Maori house/meeting place. It is traditionally respectful to take off your shoes before entering. We tried our best to imitate the tikis on the walls. Somehow our tongues never looked as big as the Maoris or tikis we were trying to imitate.

This canoe, or waka, was soooo long. It started here and went all the way to the back of the room.

We posed with many Maoris who stuck out their tongues to humor us. We learned that it actually is a symbol of defiance.

My favorite part of the Maori exhibit was the Traditional Maori Culture show we went to. These Maoris sang, danced, showed us how to use their traditional weapons, performed with the poi balls, and made us all laugh. It was great.

This was by far my favorite part of the day: MY FIRST LIVE HAKA! haha it was SO cool.

After the Maori show we explored the rest of the museum. It was neat actually seeing the kiwi bird. It's interesting how they distinguish the fruit by calling them kiwifruits, but they don't really distinguish between kiwis (birds) and kiwis (natives).

Here is another kiwi and a kiwi egg. Someone told us we just HAD to see the kiwi egg because it was so huge...when we saw this we were a bit disappointed. I guess we had just misunderstood: it is the largest bird egg in proportion to it's body size.

Another really cool part of the day was the seeing the war memorial. There is a huge hall with names covering all four walls. I thought I might see some Burnetts on the wall and sure enough there were four on the main wall, one on the wall for the South African War, and 36 Burnetts on their internet data base! Now I want to look up to see which ones I'm related to!

After the museum we went to Kelly Tarlton's Underwater Adventure. It was a cool aquarium that is actually built partially underwater. We got there in just enough time to catch the last Sting Ray encounter. These sting rays were huge!

Next we took a snowcart ride to see the penguins. It was an enclosed cart that rode around a big circle to see the penguins underwater and above. It was quite an experience...especially with the massive fake killer whale at the end haha.

There were lots of different fish. This was one of the cool ones...and if you look on the right you can see one of the many lego structures in the aquarium. Random.

One of the exhibits was an underwater tunnel with a moving walkway underneath. It was the coolest when the sharks swam right over us!

It sure was fun to be tourists instead of students for the day!